It was cold and dark. I was certain I was dreaming. The clouds had settled on the lake as though it were steaming. The ghost, she approached me from the south. I tried to speak but nothing would come out. She looked like someone that I had once known. Perhaps from another life but how could I have known? She spoke in a whisper I could hardly make out. She told me things I could not live without. As the fog lifted, her lost soul drifted into the sun. I will return every day until we can be as one.

“I need the bathroom first.”
Once inside she opened the medicine cabinet. The usual man things and a bottle of doxycycline. She frowned. The toilet smelled like piss and the claw-foot bathtub had slime rings so thick you’d get stuck.
“What’s the doxy for?” she asked, coming out and kicking off her Danskos. The blue carpet gave her shivers to walk across.
The curtains were closed and he sat on the edge of his neatly made bed, hands folded in front of him. He looked up when she came in.
“We don’t know each other very well, do we?”

Abigail Monroe stood silently, eyes distant and hands clasped below her waist. Kids bounded out of the red brick school building with a sense of elation usually possessed by adults who just won the lottery. Running to nowhere and everywhere at all once, the simple joy found in the ticking clock had not yet reversed itself. As a homeless man stumbled by, she felt a twinge of kinship. Abigail waited daily for the child she never had with the man she never married after the date she never went on with the one she bounded by, believing time would wait.

The drawn wagon came into view of London. It was 1888 and a rampant murderer was roaming the streets; Jack the Ripper.
Helena looked over buildings covered by night and thought of this place as her home. As more people fled London, Helena was becoming acquainted. She looked upon the call girls in the night as the fog shifted over London’s dreary streets. A woman in a short, red dress addressed the driver, asking if he’d like an escort. Helena knew her brother was coming soon. This would be the woman she would suggest. She would see her Jackie soon.

…and, Believing that I May Finally Understand How Two Individuals Are Sometimes Able to Be in the Presence of Each Other and Feel Okay despite Grave Existential Differences that Would Otherwise Separate Them Entirely, Retreat Back to My Bedroom of Near-Total Darkness Where I Will Read a Book of Asemic Writing until I Fall Asleep

Richard sits beside Nicole, feeling a general sense of contentment about the direction in which his life has taken him in recent years, while Nicole, much unlike Richard, feels what could be, perhaps, a sort of absolute terror minimized only by some sense of defeat in face of everything that the universe has thrust at her so forcefully, so unapologetically, since the day she exited the comfortable innocence and naivety of a childhood without bars or insecurities and entered the cruel and confusing paralysis of adulthood, its new and, to her, somewhat senseless responsibility and aching all seemingly without end.